A book titled “Sleeping with Bread” comes from a story about how caregivers in refugee camps of orphaned children couldn’t get them to sleep at night. The children worried they wouldn’t eat the next day. Someone began giving each child a loaf of bread to sleep with, and they all slept soundly knowing, “Today I ate. And I will eat again tomorrow.”


God gave His people this assurance when He rained down bread from heaven. We might say, “Well, I don’t see any bread in my life.” Manna wasn’t a fancy miracle food. It was ordinary. So ordinary that when the people saw it they asked, “What is it?”


Barbara Brown Taylor writes that if we see everything that comes our way as coming from God, there will be no end to the bread in our lives. Nothing will be too ordinary to remind us of God. I often feel like my life is painfully ordinary. But then I remember how God took care of His people, through the ordinary, one day at a time for a lifetime. And I think, “thanks to Jesus, today I ate. And I will eat again tomorrow.”